Wednesday, February 27, 2013

There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court's lawyers' lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."

Right -- the rest of us deserve to be registered to vote, but these parasites and leeches get their voting rights handed to them by a government that's therefore depriving the rest of us of ... um, something. I'm not sure what. But we're definitely getting a raw deal. And they're getting special rights.

I'm reminded of something Atrios wrote in response to a Jon Stewart segment:

... I like the inclusion of Craig T. Nelson saying, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No." Because I think that quote really gets to the true core of bullshit mountain. One can never be quite sure how much conservatives believe their own bullshit, but my longstanding theory is that they believe there's some secret super generous welfare system that only black people have access to. When they had hard times, got their government handouts, their government handouts sucked. But the blahs are out there buying their t-bones and driving their cadillacs, so they must be getting the really good welfare. Nobody helped poor Craig out, because the food stamps and and welfare sucked....

Scalia's little quip is just a non-economic corollary to that belief system.

The "Sanhedrin" comment was just completely out of left field. It has nothing to do with actual law and was a way of saying that humility should reign--but the really sick thing is that Scalia himself opposes this kind of thinking. The Sanhedrin example says, basically, in certain kinds of extreme cases of punishment the justices (and all people) should excercise extreme caution. The equivalent in US culture is the phrase "it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man should suffer." Scalia and his ilk have famously turned that one on its head. They have explicitly denied jailed people another day in court--they have done so on the grounds that whether or not that person is actually innocent is irrelevant. Society prefers that 1 innocent person should suffer rather than a hypothetical other guilty person go free.

In addition it is, of course, sick to compare judicial restraint before the awesome responsibility of the extreme punishment (death) to judicial agression in overturning racist laws and regulations aimed at preventing lawful citizens from voting. The one is meritorious and the other is not.

In addition addition people who are attempting to excercise their right to vote are not criminals and their actions can't/shouldn't be compared to that of criminals (in this case murderers).

Wow just wow. No need to panic about Sharia, the foreign threat is talmudic*. I mean doesn't Scalia know it's a major conserva no no to quote foreign courts and especially non Christian religious courts.

I don't even know how outraged conservatives must be that Scalia wants to follow the precedent of the court that found Jesus guilty of heresy.

Jesus just said that if there were a king of Jerusalem it He would be It. Scalia claimed authority to over-rule the unanimous Senate just cause he thinks they can't read past the title of a law.

I stress that I oppose the death penalty and definitely don't suggest crucifixion. A bit of impeachment might be nice though (judges, unlike other Federal Government employees can be impeached for misconduct and not just for crimes "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour," Article III section 1 and if Scalia's behavior is good, what would bad behavior be ?).

* yeah I know the Talmud came later but what do you call Sanhedric precedent ?

Also, the House voted on the renewal of the VRA, too, and while it passed overwhelming, there were something like 33 votes against it. So by Tony's logic, the VRA has more legitimacy than his own confirmation.